The Ethics of a Therapeutic Man: C. G. Jung

The sounds of machine guns across the frozen mountain ridges of Korea had not yet faded into the stillness of history when Hermann Hesse, writing to his friends from the peace and tranquility of the Engadine, reflected on the feeling of guilt that attacks men of his generation whenever they think of the peaceful times before 1914. As he said,

Whoever has been awakened and shaken by world history since the first collapse of the peaceful world will never be entirely free from the feeling of complicity, although it is more appropriate to the young, for age and experience should have taught us that this question is the same as that of our share in original sin and should not disquiet us; we can leave it to theologians and philosophers. But since within my lifetime the world in which I live has changed from a pretty, sportive, somewhat self-indulgent world of peace to a place of horror, I will no doubt suffer occasional relapses into this state of bad conscience.14a

Throughout his life Hesse and other intellectuals like him suffered occasional relapses into that “state of bad conscience.” During those times they would feel themselves responsible for the ills of the world. They were, after all, men and women of the world, as well